


the sweet far thing

by alethiometry



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Atlantis DLC, Atlantis DLC Spoilers, DLC Spoilers, F/M, Gen, Spoilers, The Fate of Atlantis, The Torment of Hades
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 18:22:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19256650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alethiometry/pseuds/alethiometry
Summary: There is a place—a tiny sliver of a place, no wider than twenty paces edge-to-edge in any direction, tucked away in serpentine crevices of the basalt plateaus that encircle the domain of Hades—that Brasidas does not dare enter.





	the sweet far thing

**Author's Note:**

> Brasidas' questline in the Atlantis DLC felt like Ubisoft stared straight into my soul and gave me a quest full of everything I ever wanted to see explored in the game. And then they blueballed me yet again, and so here we are.
> 
> Also, for the purposes of this fic, I've decided that, rather than the entire DLC being a training simulation, Alethia just straight-up yeeted Kassandra directly into the Underworld. So all the events of the DLC did actually happen for real.
> 
> Title comes from W.B. Yeats' poem, "The Rose of Battle."

There is a place—a tiny sliver of a place, no wider than twenty paces edge-to-edge in any direction, tucked away in serpentine crevices of the basalt plateaus that encircle the domain of Hades—that Brasidas does not dare enter.

_Don’t be ridiculous_ , he can almost hear Kassandra telling him. _You are barred from Elysium, but this is not Elysium._

Yes, he would tell her if she were here. Yes, it is.

How else to explain the freshness in the air, its clarity and coolness? The complete absence of the ash that coats the lungs of all the souls here, the smoke that constantly stings his eyes? How else to explain the lush verdance, shocking in their splendor to eyes that have long grown accustomed to the enveloping dullness, or the little bubbling spring and the honey-sweet breeze?

It is a temptation, he tells Kassandra-in-his-mind, planted by Hades to test his resolve. Nothing more.

In any case, he is too busy to stop there. No matter how achingly he longs for it: for the air to be sweet, the sky to be clear. For the fields and flowers of the Lakonian valley, choruses of birdsong and cicadas and the merry chatter of his countrymen as the Eurotas flows steadily down to sea.

“We used to hold contests, at the _agoge_ ,” he tells the urn in his arms as he retreats from the crevice. “Who could swim the fastest, hold his breath the longest. We would sit on one another’s shoulders and use nothing but our fists to knock the others down, then clamber exhausted onto the grassy banks and lie there until the sun turned us as red as the cloaks they gave us.”

It is not fair, he thinks, for the babe whose ashes he now carries to have never known the transcendent bliss of submerging oneself in crisp, cool water in the sultry Peloponnesian summers, when flame-headed Helios has reached his zenith.

“They bred us for war, you see,” he continues. “Bade us revoke our childhood and renounce our parents at the age of seven, then beat it out of us for good measure. Still, we found ways to be young and stupid. And that, somehow, made the beatings worth it.”

_I hate what they did to you,_ Kassandra had once told him. Whispered it, in the space between dusk and dawn when the world held its breath and there was only them. _Perhaps you made your peace with it long ago, but I hate it. And yet it is what led you to me, as surely as what they did to me led me to you. Sparta shaped us long before we could choose how to be shaped; is it wrong to want to find some trace of joy in it now, after all this time? After all the pain and suffering we’ve endured?_

No, he’d replied then. It is not wrong at all.

(It is how we survive.)

Elysium sounds like Kassandra. It calls to him without a voice, without her tenor or the lilting amusement that has drawn his smile a thousand times or more. It calls, rather, in silent yearning, in promises of respite, of someplace safe from Hades’ constant torment. Just for a moment. Just enough to rest his weary soul.

_Please,_  it seems to implore, in that voiceless cry that sounds too much like everything he’s lost. _Please, please. Let somebody else shoulder the burden. You've endured this long enough._

I’m sorry, Brasidas tells her, and feels something breaking in him for what might be the thousandth time, though he stopped counting long ago. I don’t think I have.

And he turns from the light and the life and the honey-sweet breeze—from the greenery and the birdsong and the gentle sunlight shimmering on clean, clear springwater (oh, how he misses the sun)—and descends back into the clammy darkness of the Cradle, and gathers up another tiny urn, and moves on.

 

———

 

“The place you seek but never enter,” the ferryman tells him, each word a languid drawl, “is not a trick. It is not a test. I see you lingering on its threshold, like a pup who is unsure if his owner is done admonishing him for a stolen treat. Spare yourself the anguish, and just go.”

Brasidas frowns. “How do I know I can trust your word?”

This makes Charon chuckle. “You don’t,” he says. “Not really. But your fleshling friend trusted me, if that’s worth anything to you. She may not be here to vouch for me, but the fact remains. You and she were close; she and I had a rapport. She went out of her way to help me, and since she is not here for me to return the favor, I suppose I’ll just have to settle for you.”

“Touching,” Brasidas says drily before he can think to mind his tongue. “Where is she?”

Charon shrugs. “Last I heard, she angered Hades for the last time. In so doing, she also proved herself as mighty as any great hero from your stories. And so, when she thought she’d finished repaying her debt to him, he sought to bind her to the fifth and final gate into our humble little kingdom.”

Dread rises in Brasidas like a rogue wave, cold and terrible, waiting to crash and sweep him away. “So she is his prisoner.”

“Perhaps not yet,” says Charon, and Brasidas could swear there is the tiniest spark of delight in the ferryman’s pitch-black eyes. “She challenged Hades to single combat to settle the score, and nobody has seen or heard from either since. And the gate to Tartaros remains. Open. Unguarded. Waiting for a master.”

“And you want me to find that master,” Brasidas replies, “is that it?”

If Charon’s eyes had any features, Brasidas is sure he would see them rolling.

“You fleshlings are all very presumptuous, aren’t you?” He grins. “Or perhaps it’s just you and she who share that trait. But no, Spartan, you are busy enough, and I don’t need you for anything. Except maybe to just take that which you’ve been longing for.”

“I-I can’t—”

“Do you know the qualities your kind possess that are the most exhausting?” drawls Charon, but does not pause long enough for Brasidas to answer. A white finger comes up and jabs the side of his head. “Your stubbornness.” A jab at the center of his chest. “Your sentimentality. And most of all—” A final jab, this time to the pit of his stomach, “—your guilt. It leaves a bad taste in the air, you know.”

“If you’re looking for an apology,” Brasidas mutters, “I’m not sure I know where to find one.”

Crinkles deepen around flat black eyes as Charon tosses his head back and laughs.

“ _Go_ , Spartan,” he says. “Hades is not here to condemn you. Our mutual friend made sure of that, sure as whatever trouble she got into made Elysium bloom here to begin with. Think of it as a parting gift. It’s all you’ll ever have of her in this place.”

 

———

 

He sinks to his knees in the grass, running his hands over the plush blades, and the dewdrops come away on his fingers. His eyes prick with tears he doesn’t seem quite able to shed just yet, but his breaths come long and ragged—unaccustomed, after all this time, to the absence of smoke and sulfur cloying his lungs. Sunlight caresses his face, soft and gentle, and Brasidas leans back against a sun-warmed tree trunk and closes his eyes for what he realizes is the first time since before he died.

The urns feel lighter here, too. Perhaps it helps to bring them here to rest a while, before he continues on to find the parents.

_You’re not fooling anybody,_  hisses a voice in Brasidas’ mind. _You are not coming here for them. They are nothing but ashes; what comfort could they possibly draw from this place? You selfish, arrogant thing. You broken, twisted, vile—_

_Say that again,_  growls another voice, one that puts him in mind of amber eyes at once lovely and lethal, of the passing shadow of an eagle overhead and a broken spear twirled absently between long and languid fingers. _Say that again. Fucking say it._

_Say it._

_Hmph._

_I didn’t think so._

(I miss you, Kassandra.)

 

———

 

_This doesn’t change what I feel for you, you know. None of this changes a fucking thing._

Well, perhaps it should.

_It doesn’t._

Alright.

_It feels as if I’m losing you all over again._

I’m sorry.

_This isn’t over._

Yes, it is. It’s done.

_Brasidas—_

Stop. Please, Kassandra. Stop. I am glad to do this—truly, I am. After everything we have been through, it is both an honor and a mercy. I need you to accept that.

  


_I won’t forget you._

Nor I you.

_I won’t._

I know.

  


_I promise._

I know.

  


Goodbye, Kassandra.

 

———

 

It must be years and years before Deimos arrives, but to Brasidas he looks the same as he did on the shores of Amphipolis: leonine and proud, armor gleaming even here in the smoke-dulled light of Hades.

Charon sends him to guard the fifth gate.

“She loved you,” Deimos calls out on one occasion, when Brasidas has no choice but to pass by the gate on his return to the Cradle.  “She never spoke of you, not to me. But I know she loved you dearly.”

The hulking gate looms behind him, the fires of Tartaros throwing shadows that tremble and flicker at both their feet on the ash-dusted ground.

(And I loved her. More than anything. All we wanted was more time, and you took that from us. And neither you nor I will ever see her again.)

Once upon a time, Brasidas would have said all these things, and hefted his shield and his spear and charged Deimos with the blind rage of all he’s lost, and hurled them both tumbling backwards into Tartaros.

_He is my brother; I will not turn from him._

_I won’t ask for your forgiveness. I know I can’t ask for that. But I do need your understanding._

(You have both.)

Now, he simply nods at the man who ended his life, bound for eternity in the eerie glow of near-damnation, and says, “She loved you, too.”

(At least you had a lifetime to say goodbye.)

 

———

 

Two thousand four hundred and thirty-seven years. That is how long Kassandra tells him it has been since they last parted on the crags overlooking the Fields of Mourning. To Brasidas, it feels like nothing. Two and a half millennia of pining for a thing he’d thought lost to him forever, washed away like sand from a cliffside as the force of her comes crashing through the gates. Subsumed in the joy that swells in his chest at the sight of her, and for a moment it feels as if he is breathing stolen Elysian air.

To Kassandra, swiping ferociously at her tears with the sleeves of her strange, stiff garments, the years were interminable. Her hands tremble as she beholds him, running the pad of her thumb gingerly across his cheek as if persuading herself that this is all real, and Brasidas can do nothing but hold her close.

“You’re not—you’re not bound to this place, surely?” is the first thing he asks, when he has found his words again. “What of Elysium?”

“There is no peace for me without you and Alexios,” Kassandra replies with a shrug. “I’ll come and go as I please—who’s going to stop me? The ferryman I assisted? The guardians I recruited? My brother? You?”

For the first time in two thousand four hundred and thirty-seven years, Brasidas laughs.

“Come with me, then,” he says. “Just for a little while, until you are ready for the eternal fields. There is a place I want to show you.”


End file.
